System Center Operations Manager is the end-to-end service management solution that is the best choice for Windows because it works seamlessly with Microsoft software and applications helping you increase efficiency while enabling greater control of your IT environment. System Center Operations Manager helps you address your IT management challenges so you can spend more time driving business success.

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Rated 4 out of 5 by Stevan Davis from I like the ability to create Management Packs to monitor different programs or devices.Valuable Features:Its flexibility, the ability to create Management Packs to monitor different programs or devices. No matter what it is you want to monitor or how you want to monitor, it can be done. You may have to create the code using VBScript or PowerShell, and XML, but it can be done. There are always lots of examples online that you can work from that will save you lots of time.Improvements to My Organization:The company to which I am currently contracted is in the process of creating SNMP Management packages for our network devices. Very steep learning curve but the results are fantastic. Anything that can be accessed via SNMP commands, SCOM can retrieve via SNMP Gets. This fulfills the network monitoring need extremely well and now we are getting alerts that allow us to pre-empt problems before they become service issues. This is making our network much more stable.Room for Improvement:There are always areas that can be improved in any product, but overall SCOM has matured very well over the years and appears to be at the point where only minor improvements need to be made. Since MS sends out updates regularly, these improvements can be made on the fly with very little interruption in service.Use of Solution:I have used this solution for 10 years.Deployment Issues:I did not encounter any issues with deployment. This is one area where there is plenty of documentation. It would be nice if more companies actually retained a PME for rollouts instead of just letting their brightest take a shot at it. I have had to clean up behind a lot of best efforts that could have been avoided by just bringing a contractor in for a couple of months. It seems that the biggest mistake is putting all of the management packs available in at the same time before talking to the owners that will be getting the alerts. Off-the-shelf MPs are very verbose and need to be tuned for the environment and the way in which alerts are going to be handled.Technical Support:Technical support is pretty good: very responsive, good level of understanding, rare to have to go beyond second-level support.Previous Solutions:I chose it after investigating Nagios, SiteScope, and SolarWinds. Initially, the thing that sold me was the Authoring console for creating MPs. It made it very easy to get started and produce right away. Now that MS has discontinued it, I use Visual Studio. It didn’t take long to figure Visual Studio out and now I can produce MPs as quickly as I did with the console and with more flexibility and understanding of what is going on. Most of the other programs aren’t ready off-the-shelf to the extent that SCOM is, and require a lot more work to get alerts coming in. MS has created the basic packages with all the possible monitoring and collections that they think the average company will want to use. Many of these are disabled by default and up to the implementer to go through them to see if his/her company can benefit from them. In many cases, companies will decide that anything that isn’t actionable needs to be turned off. That’s not always a good idea, as many of the alerts are preemptive to help you fix an issue before it becomes a major problem.Implementation Team:I am a contractor and work exclusively with SCOM, I have implemented at many different companies, including MS, so it’s pretty easy for me to come into an environment and know what needs to be done. Probably the most important part of the design that most companies forget about is the processes that need to be in place before you stand it up. What are we going to monitor? How are we going to handle requests for custom monitoring, and tuning or disabling of existing monitoring and collections? Who and where are we sending alerts? Are they aware of what is going to be coming at them? Did you sit down with each and every group that you are installing MPs for and go over the monitoring and collections to see what they want and don’t want? DBA’s, for example, don’t want to see endless alerts about SPNs, or even permissions. Get this worked out before installing the SQL package and the DBA group will be much easier to work with. How are you going to route alerts, are you going to send them to a ticketing application? If so you have to decide how to do that. Are you going to send all alerts and have the ticketing system decide what is an actionable alert, or are you going to create subscriptions in SCOM to handle it?Other Solutions Considered:As compared to some of the others that I have been exposed to, SCOM has its good and bad points. Documentation is poor, but the community makes up for it with good blogs and lots of how-to examples.Other Advice:Get knowledgeable help, not someone off the street that says they know SCOM, but someone that can show a track record of working with it. You will save lots of time and money.It is so flexible and easy to learn if the right processes are put into place.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2016-12-23

Rated 3 out of 5 by Hemendra Singh from All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains. It needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform.Valuable Features:* Agent based monitoring* Agentless monitoring* VSAE* Rules* Monitors* SLA* Server monitoringImprovements to My Organization:All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains which helps us to check the health of the server, to get the server details like IIS, app pools, Performance counters like CPU, Memory, Disk usage, etc.Room for Improvement:SCOM needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform and instead provide web access for all browsers using HTML5 probably. The API and the knowledge base needs to be improved by Microsoft.Use of Solution:I've used it for two years.Deployment Issues:We've had no issues with deployment.Stability Issues:SCOM server needs periodic maintenance to make sure the disk/database has enough space and a lot of alerts across a big environment might come fairly quickly. At times it needs server and service restarts.Scalability Issues:We've had no issues with scalability.Customer Service:5/10Technical Support:5/10Previous Solutions:I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.This was the first monitoring solution we used, but we have moved out the URL monitoring away from SCOM to StatusCake and VictorOps as StatusCake has an easy REST based endpoint for monitoring and VictorOps provides us on call support. We are continuing with SCOM as we need agent based monitoring for our SAAS solutions.Initial Setup:The initial setup is fairly simple if you read the installation documents beforehand and install all the prerequisites properly, otherwise it can be a fairly long task.Implementation Team:I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.ROI:It has a good ROI.Cost and Licensing Advice:Pricing and licensing is fairly OK. If you have a MSDN license, then your dev environments can be set up for free as you can get a dev SCOM license from MSDN. You only have to pay for production SCOM server if you have a MSDN license.Other Advice:Implement a prototype management pack on the dev environment and analyze all the pros and cons before buying the product. You can get a free six months trial on this also.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a Microsoft Gold partner.

Date published: 2016-11-17

Rated 3 out of 5 by Baris Dogan F from .NET monitoring capabilities are crucial for our organization. I would like to see true multi-tenancy support.Valuable Features:Extensible dashboards allow us to create customized service-level dashboards for business owners..NET ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/net ) monitoring capabilities are crucial for our organization to monitor the availability and performance of our IIS-based .NET applications.Network monitoring ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/network-monitoring-software ) also completes the monitoring story by providing visibility over the network layer. All backend routers and switches are monitored by SCOM and also we consume some third-party network management packs to extend the capability.Improvements to My Organization:SCOM provided end-to-end monitoring for all aspects of the infrastructure, including web sites, network devices, databases and applications. Now, c-level management can easily see overall service-level dashboards and SLAs for mission-critical services.Room for Improvement:I would like to see true multi-tenancy support. When it comes to service provider type of customers, it's quite difficult to have a complete monitoring view for different tenants. The System Center ( https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/system-center ) suite is not designed for true multi-tenancy overall. But SCOM is also lacking some multi-tenant environment requirements.Use of Solution:I have used it for nine years.Deployment Issues:High-available deployment with SQL always on requires detailed planning and testing before production implementation. We needed different internal teams involved in the planning phase including the network team for bandwidth utilization, the database team for SQL and application owners. We also encountered some problems while implementing SQL always on on a multi-site SCOM deployment. We resolved problems by contacting Microsoft support.Initial Setup:Single-server deployment was quite straightforward. We deployed it for a POC and pre-prod environment. Online TechNet articles cover most of the steps. But when it comes to HA design for multiple datacenters, it gets complicated.Also, we had to use PowerShell for some settings to reduce the deployment time. SCOM shell commands are not enough to achieve most of the tasks so we used SDK instead of PowerShell, which was an oddly difficult experience.Implementation Team:I have done both types of implementations in the past. See below.Other Advice:The planning phase is crucial. Also note that SCOM admin can not plan the whole infrastructure. All application owners should be involved in planning phase. Also, post-configuration tasks should be taken care of by application owners, such as custom monitors, tunings for alerts, etc.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:My current company, AWS, is a Gold Certified member of the Microsoft Partner Network.

Date published: 2016-11-08

Rated 2 out of 5 by Joseph Dissmeyer from ​If you have a somewhat small environment then I would recommend to look for alternatives. If you are an existing Microsoft Enterprise CAL customer, SCOM is worth the evaluation.​Valuable Features:Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awardsExcellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilitiesFast and consistent UX for system adminsExtensive dashboarding capabilitiesREST API availableExcellent technical support, rich user communityDesigned for on-premise installationsImprovements to My Organization:After reviewing alternatives based on our existing needs, we decided against SCOM for the time being.Room for Improvement:Lacks common network monitoring features found in alternatives.Poor support for non-Microsoft systems at this time.User dashboards require posting to Microsoft SharePoint Server.Very high administrative burden, requires constant maintenance.Application transaction monitoring only available in .NET applications on IIS.Limited analytics capabilities (you must build your own in SSRS)Full monitoring capabilities requires integration with the rest of the Microsoft System Center suiteUse of Solution:2 yearsDeployment Issues:Yes, many. Official documentation fails to list all required TCP/UDP ports necessary for installing the base server as well as gateway servers that are members of remote domains.We also encountered many issues with each service account used by SCOM that took several days to resolve (domain account rights can be troublesome if not set up correctly from the beginning).Stability Issues:No. Once SCOM was up and running we never had a failure.Scalability Issues:No. Scalability is one of the hallmarks of SCOM. It is designed for scaling up/out.Customer Service:Good.Technical Support:Very good. Microsoft's technical support team for SCOM is very knowledgeable and is responsive. Most of your technical support documentation/ information can be found on TechNet as well.Initial Setup:Initial setup was extremely complex with security certificates, multiple installation options depending on the server roles in the system, multiple service accounts are needed, as well as delegation of rights for each account. It took several days of troubleshooting to resolve each issue as they were found during initial installation.Implementation Team:Our own team installed the system in-house.ROI:None.Cost and Licensing Advice:With regards to licensing, if your organization has Enterprise CALs then SCOM is typically included in the suite and may help you if you are trying to save operational costs.Other Advice:SCOM truly demands it's own support team to manage and administer it (not to mention applying the monthly patches) and is designed for monitoring mid-to-large on-premise environments. If you have a somewhat small environment, or if you do not have the people resources to support a SCOM install then I would recommend to look for alternatives. However if you are an existing Microsoft Enterprise CAL customer SCOM is worth the evaluation.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2016-06-27

Rated 3 out of 5 by Edgar Parra from It integrates with your Windows environment seamlessly and provides a lot of visibility on your Windows environment.Valuable Features:It integrates with your Windows environment seamlessly and provides a lot of visibility on your Windows environment. If you use SCCM as well, it integrates beautifully with it.Room for Improvement:The interface doesn't provide any graphical view of your topology, you only see a bunch of alerts, monitors, etc. Humans are visual creatures and if you can see at a glance what's going on in your infrastructure, that's added value to me.You can create dashboards to create views of your infrastructure but I feel that this should come out of the box.It generates a lot of false positives, probably due to misconfiguration or because it doesn't have an intuitive algorithm to pinpoint the root of the problemYou need to add a lot of management packs in order to manage different devices, instead of SCOM containing these already out of the box, I'm talking about vendors such as Citrix and VMware. Even Exchange and SQL Server monitors are not configured out of the box, it requires configuration. This should come straight away configured for you, especially as SQL Server and Exchange are Microsoft products!Deployment Issues:We've had no issues with deployment.Stability Issues:It's been stable for us.Scalability Issues:It lacks capabilities to properly monitor other devices or infrastructure that is not Microsoft based, stuff like Linux, UNIX, Cisco routers, switches. I mean, since it is not the core of the product, the monitoring capabilities on these devices is very basic if I compare it with CA Spectrum which it used to be a network product that evolved into something else to cover other critical and important areas like Application and Systems performance and Servers/Systems in general.Technical Support:In New Zealand, it's 4/5.Initial Setup:Configuration of alerts and monitors is very convoluted. You need to configure four or five different places to make a monitor work.Cost and Licensing Advice:The price is OK, and I think the licensing works the same as any other Microsoft product.Other Advice:I find this product very clunky and not very intuitive to use, it took me a while to find my way around and understand where I needed to go to configure or even get a report is a bit complicated.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2016-06-24

Rated 3 out of 5 by Hemendra Singh from All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains. It needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform.Valuable Features:* Agent based monitoring* Agentless monitoring* VSAE* Rules* Monitors* SLA* Server monitoringImprovements to My Organization:All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains which helps us to check the health of the server, to get the server details like IIS, app pools, Performance counters like CPU, Memory, Disk usage, etc.Room for Improvement:SCOM needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform and instead provide web access for all browsers using HTML5 probably. The API and the knowledge base needs to be improved by Microsoft.Use of Solution:I've used it for two years.Deployment Issues:We've had no issues with deployment.Stability Issues:SCOM server needs periodic maintenance to make sure the disk/database has enough space and a lot of alerts across a big environment might come fairly quickly. At times it needs server and service restarts.Scalability Issues:We've had no issues with scalability.Customer Service:5/10Technical Support:5/10Previous Solutions:I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.This was the first monitoring solution we used, but we have moved out the URL monitoring away from SCOM to StatusCake and VictorOps as StatusCake has an easy REST based endpoint for monitoring and VictorOps provides us on call support. We are continuing with SCOM as we need agent based monitoring for our SAAS solutions.Initial Setup:The initial setup is fairly simple if you read the installation documents beforehand and install all the prerequisites properly, otherwise it can be a fairly long task.Implementation Team:I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.ROI:It has a good ROI.Cost and Licensing Advice:Pricing and licensing is fairly OK. If you have a MSDN license, then your dev environments can be set up for free as you can get a dev SCOM license from MSDN. You only have to pay for production SCOM server if you have a MSDN license.Other Advice:Implement a prototype management pack on the dev environment and analyze all the pros and cons before buying the product. You can get a free six months trial on this also.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a Microsoft Gold partner.

Date published: 2016-06-23

Rated 5 out of 5 by Mark Castro from We have prevented various problems and have been able to resolve issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts.Valuable Features:Real time monitoring/alerts. Pro-active response to warning alerts are invaluable and have saved disasters quite a few times.Improvements to My Organization:We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool. We have prevented various problems and have been able to resolve issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, it assists our department in being pro-active in regards to resolving issues with servers/services rather the reactive. The level of monitoring from overview health to granular object monitoring is excellent.Use of Solution:I've been using it for four years.Deployment Issues:I wasn't involved in the deployment.Stability Issues:We've had no issues with the stability.Scalability Issues:We have needed to increase the VM resources as we’ve added more servers and increased monitoring packs, but that’s to be expected.Technical Support:Microsoft support is generally excellent, we’ve never raised a call for SCOM though.Previous Solutions:We have some in house monitoring that’s looked after by our NOC team, however, this is basic SNMP monitoring, so nothing in comparison.Initial Setup:It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively “noisy” out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action.Implementation Team:It was done in-house.ROI:Very difficult to gauge. Using most or all of the Security Centre Suite ensures that the license cost is very reasonable considering what’s in the suite. To just use SCOM would be a very expensive license per server in my opinion, best to use multiple products in this suite.Other Advice:Ensure you have plenty of resources to throw at the environment, space for data warehouse and SQL as it will be resource hungry for SCOM (server estate size relevant of course). Be prepared for some initial time investment and ensure regular updates and management packs are applied to make the product as useful as possible.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a Microsoft Platinum partner.

Date published: 2016-02-09

Rated 4 out of 5 by Rodney Garcia from The reports provide high-level summaries and detailed information about your systems and can be e-mailed on a specified schedule or simply exported and printed out.Valuable Features:One of the most important features of SCOM is the Reporting Server role which runs on the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It’s responsible for rendering and scheduling reports. With Operations Manager, you have extract reporting capabilities and multiple report libraries that you can select from to customize reports to your own granular requirements.It will help you to visualize the data in your environment. The reports provide high-level summaries and detailed information about your systems and can be e-mailed on a specified schedule or simply exported and printed out. The reporting server performs queries against the Operations Manager data warehouse database and returns the results in a number of easy-to-read formats.Another point, you can import management packs available for Microsoft products, which you can customize thresholds of several counters of each product. Also, you can create your management pack and define your customizations.Improvements to My Organization:This tool could be improved especially for tasks for our Capacity Planning Team and Monitoring Team. The Capacity Planning Team collect data through the reports from the Operations Manager for the memory, CPU and disks during the month. The use this to make dashboards to show their customers about their environment. With this, it’s possible to show environment of each customer.For the Monitoring Team, it helps monitor a simple and complex environment in IT sending determinate alerts. For example, if your team receives a determined kind of alert, they will work on the solution before that problem occurs. Through the Operations Console, the Monitoring Team can see critical and warning alerts and if necessary, dispatch for a responsible team is the Database Team, Operating System Team or Exchange Team, etc. It’s clear that it's also possible to send alerts creating split groups for Database Team, Operation System Team, and send alerts for the respective products to the team responsible. It depends on each organization.Room for Improvement:I think that it should be made possible to monitor private systems, which are developed in each company. In my opinion, this option already exists in SCOM 2012, however we have a lack of resources to develop this.Use of Solution:In this company, SCOM has been in place since 2006, starting with MOM in 2005 and after that, it was upgrade to SCOM 2007.I've used it to monitor several Microsoft Servers, which I've customized thresholds to support in Exchange, File Servers, SQL Servers, Clusters and others products.Stability Issues:I had issues with SCOM 2007 and MOM 2005, regarding the view of alerts in the Console Operations. It delayed showing critical alerts to the monitoring Team, because they could not see alerts in the Operations Console. For this kind of issue, I had issues with database maintenance as well.Technical Support:I have a contact at Microsoft Premier, and I find it necessary to us them to open a case with Microsoft, if they think that it's possible to fix the issue.Previous Solutions:In another company, I’ve had experience with BMC Patrol, Tivolli and SiteScope as NETQoS products, but this tool I’ve worked with administration.Initial Setup:There were no issues with setting up SCOM.Other Advice:Follow the best practices and there should be no issues.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.